Okay, something else came up earlier when I was talking to @AlexandraErin.

When antis find out someone is into sexual fantasies that can be categorized as “abusive”—including but not limited to rape—it’s fascinating how they assume we place ourselves in the place of the abuser.

When in my experience the exact opposite is overwhelmingly the case. Not every single time but by far the majority of the time.

People are not fantasizing about/getting off on being abusers. They’re fantasizing/getting off on being abused.

It’s bizarre and I don’t know quite how to untangle it, but I think a lot of it is because how they interpret this kind of sexuality allows for no benign experience of it whatsoever. If you’re into it you must want to *do* it, not have it done *to* you.

(They already don’t comprehend how anyone could fantasize about anything and yet not want it to really happen but let’s just take that as read for the purposes of this thread)

So in addition to all the “sexual assault is not a kink” nonsense we get (according to real social scientists who do real research it totally is, sorry, just because you don’t want it to be doesn’t make it not so), there is this basically incoherent notion of how consent works.

In the anti worldview there are devious evil scheming predators and helpless innocent guileless victims/potential victims and not much middle ground. There is no space for “I want to be hurt in this way under these specific safe circumstances”.

If you write about rape you must fantasize about being a rapist. I will not even *begin* to get into age play/general roleplay here but I think it’s obvious where I’d go with that.

(No, people who engage in age play are not remotely pedophiles, sorry, science again)

Even if you do fantasize about being raped, there is no way you would do that unless you’re working through trauma. You do not have fantasies like that unless you’re broken inside. There is no other possibility.

(So produce your Trauma Papers pls)

And the warped idea they have of the “cycle of abuse” basically puts the kibosh on that anyway, because even if you do fantasize about being raped, if you don’t eventually stop you will become a rapist/sexual abuser yourself, you have no choice, that is The Rules.

The notion that someone might have these fantasies without being sexually traumatized and without ever for some reason flipping roles and doing it irl to real people is literally incomprehensible. So they never go to that possibility first.

Rape fantasies means you’re at best a nascent rapist no matter where you are in the dynamic. Period.

Also no, consent in roleplay is not possible.

(And if you’re traumatized/mentally ill consent is also not possible under any circumstances)

A lot of things about antis perplex me but especially among them is precisely when and how they arrived at this messed up concept of how consent works. It’s clearly related to how they don’t understand the way sexual fantasies work (and fantasies in general) but yes.

When I was a wee fandom baby, I don’t recall ever running into this. I’m sure it was out there, it always is, but fuck’s sake, fandom is what introduced me to the idea of BDSM and how to practice it in a healthy, safe way.

As far as I recall there was this general assumption that you can have and even practice these fantasies in various ways without being broken. That some people just, like, get off on some weird and even messed-up shit and that doesn’t mean they’re dangerous.

And I recall the general assumption being that if someone was clearly writing a rape fantasy, they were placing themselves primarily in the place of the person being raped. Which did not mean they had been or wanted to be raped.

So where did this come from? Why do these people now assume that you are always in the position of the abuser? Why do they jump right to that when they start screaming? Where was the moment of breakage? It’s utterly bizarre.

I especially don’t understand how they’ve grown up immersed in an Internet where it’s easier to find information on kink than it’s ever been, and yet they are completely clueless about how kink works.

That’s another area in which their moral outrage seems confined almost entirely to the realm of the fictional without ever going into any deeper cultural analysis. Because yeah, I don’t entirely buy that idea but a cogent argument can at least be *made* https://twitter.com/mahanonangel/status/1200536069990572032?s=21 https://twitter.com/mahanonangel/status/1200536069990572032

And what’s especially odd about all this is that, as I’ve seen a ton of older Millennials/young GenXers point out, *we were told that the Internet was unsafe*. Most of us went in with that assumption as well.

Our parents went through real moral panics over it. Everyone we talked to in any chatroom was in truth a middle-aged man grooming us for predation.

We kinda just rolled our eyes and went about our business, because guess what: it wasn’t true.

But we also knew that it wasn’t a safe space. And it wasn’t. It really, really wasn’t. It was still kind of wild out there in the late 90s . The social Web was pretty new. We were learning to navigate it as we went.

It *should* have been safer. People *did* get hurt. All of that is true. I’m not remotely saying that was a golden age of some kind, because it patently was not.

But I think because we knew it wasn’t safe, most of us got savvy and we got savvy fast.

We learned to navigate because we had to. I think I picked up pretty quick on how to keep myself as safe as possible and how to avoid upsetting content, because I had to. I learned what was dangerous and what wasn’t. So I apprehended pretty fast that kink wasn’t.

It’s like running wild in the woods or something. You learn what plants are poisonous. You learn what animals to avoid. It’s not *good* that you have to learn those things, it’s bad that you’re in danger, but you learn to not mistake safety for danger and vice-versa.

And that kind of learning-on-the-fly generally doesn’t happen the way it used to. Kids raised on Web 2.0/2.5 are surrounded by so much more information than we were, but I think a lot of them have never really learned how to navigate it, so danger is EVERYWHERE

I’m not saying they’re not savvy. They’re incredibly savvy. Adults way underestimate that, to the detriment of everyone (adults always do).

But it does appear to me that at least the cohort that populates anti groups is very confused about how to identify real danger.

And how to identify when danger is not present. That, plus learned helplessness, equals what I said earlier today: Danger is everywhere, predators are everywhere, everything that seems scary or unfamiliar is a real threat, and you are only safe with The Group.

And it is not possible to fantasize about rape without being a rapist.

(Which means there’s also a strong vein of science denial in antidom but that’s another thread)